Polenta in the Crockpot

I love to cook and I love polenta, but I don't have the patience to stand and stir for 30 minutes. I have tried this crockpot version several times now, and it's been a big success.

Polenta

2 cups polenta

6 cups boiling water

2 tablespoons butter

1/4 teaspoon paprika

2 teaspoons salt

Place polenta in crockpot and gradually add boiling water, stirring until smooth. Add remaining ingredients. Cook on High for 3 to 4 hours, stirring every 20 or 30 minutes. If desired, a few minutes before serving stir in

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese.

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Deer Sausage and Mushroom Gravy

My friend Dave gave us some venison that his cousin shot and took to a processor. Item #1 was this entertainingly packaged sausage.

It looks like something you would buy from under the table at a flea market, but it is very tasty. It's seasoned like standard American breakfast sausage -- black pepper, sage, salt, red chile flakes -- and is well balanced in a way that highlights the dark, sweet deer flavor.

Item #2, unfortunately -- and Dave warned me about this -- is a packet of square patties with some kind of seasoning added such that they taste very much like fast food chicken sandwiches. They are quite alarming. The meat is too finely ground and the seasonings oddly chemical. They taste nothing like deer. They are nearly inedible.

I put some of the sausage to good use for a recent dinner. I made two sausage patties and browned them and set them aside -- they were probably medium rare at that point, but they cooked a little more in the sauce at the end.


I then used the same pan with a little extra olive oil to saute onions, garlic, shitake mushrooms, and cremini mushrooms. Then I added vermouth or maybe leftover Riesling and scraped up the pan goop left over from the sausage. There was a lot of it -- very effective. I added chicken broth, fresh sage, and thyme, and let the whole thing simmer a bit.

I thickened it slightly with cornstarch, which made for a nice glossy brown sauce.

At the end I added a bunch of parsley and reheated the sausage patties in the sauce. I served it over polenta/grits...I think I called it polenta that night.

Cooking Habit Live and In Person: Plating

I liked this sequence of photos from when we made dinner together earlier this week, Mom.

First, roasted tomato vinaigrette.

Then polenta -- just coarse cornmeal and water simmered for a few hours and finished with butter and parmesan -- and pan-grilled grouper.

And finally swiss chard, grown and harvested by Dad and sauteed by you with some garlic.

Kale, Mushrooms, and Bacon over Polenta Taragna

Last night I made this, which is easily one of the best things I've eaten this year -- much more than the sum of its parts. The lemon zest pulls the dish together in surprising ways.

Some minor modifications: I used much less thyme, because our thyme plant is dry and stunted. I used two cloves of garlic, not one. I poured off all but one tablespoon of the bacon grease before adding the olive oil. And I used polenta taragna, which is a combination of ground buckwheat and corn, instead of regular polenta. I finished the polenta with a small bit of half and half -- cheese seemed too rich.

Best of all, this dinner helped me get over the disaster earlier this week in which I roasted some buttercup squash and made a beautiful soup, only to find that it tasted like feet. It was irremediable. The squash had some sort of moldy rot, invisible to the eye, that had completely saturated the soup with strong funk. We ate grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner.

Kale has redeemed me. I love greens with all my heart.

A snack

Lest everyone think I eat only bacon-filled soups and homemade cookies, here is my post-gym snack: plain yogurt with almonds, dates, flax seed oil, and cinnamon. Check out the beautiful Japanese stoneware bowls I found at the Goodwill this weekend for 50 cents apiece.

For Christmas we gave Lawson's parents an Omaha Steaks gift certificate, so yesterday we had them over to eat the steaks. They requested ribeye, which was gristly but really tasty. Lawson had a New York strip instead, which had much less flavor. We had to keep the meal pretty traditional, so I made beets vinaigrette and that lemon custard souffle thing I love, and Lawson made wonderful roasted potatoes with rosemary, and sauteed spinach & mushrooms.

The best things I've made lately are: a) polenta using ground heirloom corn from the local mill one of my friends works at. Wow. And b) brussels sprouts braised in garlic butter. Finally I like brussels sprouts.

Piedmont Peppers and Polenta

I forgot to include this photo of our wonderful Piedmont Peppers from the weekend. The recipe is in Rustic Italian Cooking by Kathleen Sloan. Everyone should own this cookbook. You can buy a barely used copy at amazon.com for a couple of dollars and spend weeks happily cooking your way through the book.

Chicken Tagine with Chickpeas and Almonds

I’m not sure about tagines. I tried a lamb one from my Paula Wolfert cookbook a few months ago, and it was grey. The problem with traditional Moroccan tagine recipes I have read is that (a) they don’t have any garlic in them! and (b) the meat isn’t browned first. I have a hard time getting past those two prejudices, but as I write I am simmering a chicken/almond/chickpea tagine from my new Roden cookbook and it smells wonderful.

Later...

I had to blanch the almonds for the tagine. I had a general idea about boiling water, etc., but I couldn’t find the information in my cookbooks. So I looked it up on the Internet and indeed, I had to pour boiling water over them, wait one minute, drain and rinse in cold water, and then rub the skins off. Ha! About one third of them succumbed the first time around. The remaining ones needed the microwave treatment before giving up their skins. The tagine recipe indicated that they would get quite soft in and hour and a half of stewing, but it didn’t really happen. The chicken was tender, though, and the sauce “unctuous” as promised. Because of the rich blandness of the tagine I accompanied it with yogurt-cucumber-garlic sauce and homemade pear chutney. I served it with couscous and a favorite zucchini dish.

Favorite Zucchini Dish

Slice two smallish zucchini lengthwise into thin slabs. Lay in a baking dish and turn to coat with 1 teaspoon olive oil.

Top with the following mixture:
½ cup bread crumbs
¼ cup parmesan
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt, pepper
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 or 2 cloves minced garlic
Juice of ½ lemon

Bake at 350 degrees for 20 or 30 minutes, or until tender and browned on top.

Of course things take longer to get done just right when you’re in a hurry, have you noticed that?

Interesting Cookbook Note: I looked in the new white 1997 Joy of Cooking for how to blanch almonds—no joy. Later I found the information in the old blue 1964 one.

Swordfish and Polenta

Swordfish and Polenta

I love those round tubes of pre-cooked polenta!--“shelf-stable” and a nice change from other starchy things. I am taking Andrew Weill’s advice to heart lately and try to eat a rainbow of foods, especially carbohydrates. Previously I ate mostly wheat—bread (I was proud that it was always homemade and whole grain), pasta, wheat tortillas—but have broadened out to sweet potatoes, quinoa, brown rice, whole rye crackers, occasional white potatoes, acorn and butternut squash. I put 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a cookie sheet, lay the slices of polenta in and turned them over once so each side would have some oil, and baked at 425 degrees for 20 minutes, turning once.

Dad was also cooking tonight, so he made the fresh (uncooked, that is) tomato and herb topping for the polenta, and the sauteed yellow squash.

I cooked the swordfish our favorite way in my favorite pan, pictured here. We bought it on our twentieth-anniversary trip to Paris, at the Dehillerin shop. Dehillerin had pans like this ranging from mini to restaurant-sized, literally three feet long, and every other kind of cooking implement in every size. It was a wonderland of whisks and copper things.

What is so glorious about this pan? Well, it’s copper lined with tin and can withstand any kind of heat—broiler, hot oven, stovetop—and is a perfect thickness. And it looks French.

Favorite Swordfish

Make a paste of these ingredients and spread on swordfish steak or fillet:
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon minced garlic
½ teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon sherry
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Put in pan and pour a little white vermouth or wine around. Bake at 500 degrees for about 15 minutes.